426: How Your Data Model Shapes Your Product

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Jack Ellis recently shared that storing page views and custom events in separate database tables was his biggest mistake at Fathom Analytics. That got me thinking about my own data modeling decisions at Podscan—choices I made on day one that now, two years and 45 million episodes later, either enable or constrain everything I build.

Today, I'm exploring how your data model doesn't just store information, it fundamentally shapes how you think about your product. From the simple decision of whether to include teams in your authentication system to the complex realities of running full-text search across terabytes of transcript data, I'll share the migrations, the blue-green deployments, and the hard lessons about building flexibility into both your infrastructure and your founder mindset.

I'm running a time-limited Black Friday sale of The Bootstrapper's Bundle: all my books, all my courses, all formats, for $25 instead of $100+. Grab it here: https://tbf.link/bff

This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.com
You'll find the Black Friday Guide here: https://www.paddle.com/learn/grow-beyond-black-friday

The blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/how-your-data-model-shapes-your-product/
The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/426-how-your-data-model-shapes-your-product

Check out Podscan, the Podcast database that transcribes every podcast episode out there minutes after it gets released: https://podscan.fm
Send me a voicemail on Podline: https://podline.fm/arvid

You'll find my weekly article on my blog: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com

My book Zero to Sold: https://zerotosold.com/
My book The Embedded Entrepreneur: https://embeddedentrepreneur.com/
My course Find Your Following: https://findyourfollowing.com


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Creators and Guests

Arvid Kahl
Host
Arvid Kahl
Empowering founders with kindness. Building in Public. Sold my SaaS FeedbackPanda for life-changing $ in 2019, now sharing my journey & what I learned.
426: How Your Data Model Shapes Your Product
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